this should not be included in the discussion, because OP seems to suggest a concept that has merit and is coherent in itself, and is capable of being understood, but has a huge popular misconception. WP is only political rhetoric.

I disagree. The notion that white people living in a white majority society enjoy a privilege that non-white people do not is a completely valid concept. Unfortunately, low IQ shitlibs have slapped the term on anything and everything with reckless abandon.

I suppose the term as you define it is empirically true, but it has very little value apart from politics.

My children also enjoy a privilege within my household that neighborhood children do not. My beagle enjoys a privilege that a raccoon in the attic does not. A white guy in Beijing who can speak Chinese will enjoy privileges that one who does not, will not.

I hardly think this is an "academic concept", except insofar as any description of reality is. White privilege in white society. Rich privilege in capitalist society. Muscle privilige in feats of strength. Intelligence privilge in puzzle solving. Gills privilege in the ocean.

I think this means that is it susceptible to jargonizing and therefore "permeates all aspects of social and economic interaction" plus add in some postmodern gibberish and... there you go. affirmative Action should NEVER be ended etc

Whites are on the short end of discrimination and the beneficial end of discrimination. If you can't wrap your head around the concept that whites receive *some* benefits simply by being white (regardless of whether there are also some detriments), you are a moron.

better to be 130 IQ white guy in america, ceteris paribus, than 130 IQ asian, because asians are disadvantaged in elite admissions and elite sexxx with babes.

but ceteris paribus 130 IQ white guy vs. black guy? that's tougher.

black guy: gets pulled over by the cops more and unfashionable poor whites (rednecks) might call you a nigger from time to time.

otoh, black guy gets a huge, +3SD advantage on the SAT in admissions. same deal in grad school. huge advantage in hiring. and rich whites and jews fall all over themselves to hunt down your oppressors and destroy them.

Date: October 25th, 2016 1:41 PMAuthor: Now I am become Chad, the destroyer of roasties

i guess broadly speaking people who are within the field of Philosophy of Physics have books that are much more conceptually precise than most popular physics books while also addressing metaphysical issues that are ignored in the purely "shut up and calculate" approach that many textbooks take. David Albert's _Quantum Mechanics and Experience_ is a good book about the interpretation of quantum mechanics which i can vouch for, but there are others as well.

some popular physics authors are better than others, but at least one of the candidates worth mentioning is a personal acquaintance of mine and i can't claim to make any unbiased recommendations. perhaps Roger Penrose's _Road to Reality_, but that just tries to give you a relatively brief summary of all of the gory mathematical details that you would usually spend years learning in graduate school if you wanted to wanted to become a real expert in it rather than reading a popular physics book, at the cost of the book being incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't already know about all the stuff he's talking about

The general population is split between people who think it's evil propaganda that mandates a Godless universe in which Jesus was a liar and people who think it provides them with personal affirmation that they are quantitatively better, more virtuous, and more enlightened than people and societies that came before

something like that any result within a confidence interval is equally likely ("it's a statistical dead heat!" after 10 different polls showing the same basic result). or that a 95% confidence interval actually means something other than being a common convention.

Jfc I've completely extrapolated all experience of Nietzche from reading like 20 pages of zarathustra in high school and the random neckbeard out of context quotes scattered throughout the Internet, I need to (re?)visit Nietzche

1. Most books that address Nietzsche’s life and writings discuss his difficult relationship with Richard Wagner, but your book deals more systematically than others do with Nietzsche’s ideas about music, and the book’s website even includes a series of pieces composed by Nietzsche. How did Nietzsche’s ideas about music affect his philosophy?

prof-young

“Without music life would be an error” is a great T-shirt slogan, but its meaning is far from obvious. Here is how Nietzsche glosses his aphorism in a letter from 1888, the last year of his sanity:

Music … frees me from myself, it sobers me up from myself, as though I survey the scene from a great distance … It is very strange. It is as though I had bathed in some natural element. Life without music is simply an error, exhausting, an exile.

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Richard Wagner, is constructed around the duality between the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” Apollo stands for intellect, reason, control, form, boundary-drawing and thus individuality. Dionysus stands for the opposites of these; for intuition, sensuality, feeling, abandon, formlessness, for the overcoming of individuality, absorption into the collective. Crucially, Apollo stands for language and Dionysus for music. What, therefore, music does is to–as we indeed say–”take one out of oneself.” Music transports us from the Apollonian realm of individuals to which our everyday self belongs and into the Dionysian unity. Music is mystical.

Since the human essence is the will to live–or for Nietzsche, the “will to power”–the worst thing that can happen to us is death. Death is our greatest fear, so that without some way of stilling it we cannot flourish. This is why musical mysticism is important. In transcending the everyday ego we are delivered from “the anxiety brought by time and death.” Through absorption into what Tristan und Isolde calls the “waves of the All,” we receive the promise and experience of immortality.

Later on, Nietzsche realized that not all music is Dionysian. Much classical music, based as it is on the geometrical forms of dance and march, is firmly rooted in the Apollonian. Yet as the 1888 letter indicates, he never abandoned the musical “antidote” to death. Without music, life would be anxiety and then extinction. Without music, life would be an “exile” from the realm of immortality.

Nietzsche wrote not for lecture halls but to convert his contemporaries to an new way of living in a post-death-of-God world. This is why he believed that, without music, not only life but also philosophy would be an “error.” He ‘”thirsted” after a “master composer” who could “learn my thoughts from me and hereafter speak them in his language.” Only thus, he believed, could he “penetrate into people’s ears and hearts.” Like today’s filmmakers, Nietzsche learned from Wagner that words combined with music have a power to move our feelings–and thus our lives–that words alone can never achieve. Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Mahler’s Third Symphony would thus have received, I believe, Nietzsche’s enthusiastic approval.

4. It’s conventional to portray Nietzsche as a nihilist who rejects religion as a sort of fraud, but you argue that religion was essential to his vision for a new society. Where do you see his embrace of a new religion, and what exactly does this religion look like?

Émile Durkheim defines religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices… which unite in one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Originally, this is how Wagner thought about religion. What had preserved ancient Athens as a flourishing community had been Greek tragedy, the original Gesamtkunstwerk, or collective artwork. Tragedy was “collective” not only because it collected together the individual arts–music, words, acting, dance, scene-painting–but also because it gathered the entire community. The tragic festival, like the medieval mass, was a sacred occasion on which the community was gathered into a clarifying affirmation of its fundamental ethos–that which made it the community it was. In his earlier, “optimistic” days, Wagner’s own music dramas, and more specifically the Bayreuth festival, were intended to be the rebirth of Greek tragedy, a rebirth that would rescue Western modernity from its desolate, fragmented condition.

With his 1854 conversion to Schopenhauer’s “pessimism,” Wagner gave up on community, on indeed the world in general. “Redemption” became a matter of post-mortem ascension to a supernatural “beyond.” Art and religion–Wagner saw no light between the two–now became, as Nietzsche puts it, the “will to death.”

After a decade of confusion, in about 1880 Nietzsche finally became clear that what he endorsed in Wagner was the early philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and what he hated was the turn to Schopenhauerian “life-denial,” which he considered an apostasy. We must, he wrote, “become better Wagnerians than Wagner,” explaining that “In the end, it was the aged Wagner against whom I had to protect myself.” Thus, immediately after announcing the “death of [the Christian] God,” The Gay Science calls for the creation of new “festivals” and says that the only art that matters is the “art of festivals.”

Nietzsche’s mature view is thus that community cannot exist without being gathered and preserved by a Gesamtkunstwerk. There cannot be genuine community without (in the broadest possible sense of the term) a “church.” And community is important, for only if there exists a community to which we feel we are, in our own way, as we say, “making a contribution” can we live meaningful, flourishing lives. As to the content of a communal religion–as to what would play the exemplary role played in Christianity by its saints and martyrs–he has no view. That content may vary widely depending on the cultural tradition of the community concerned. Nietzsche’s only stipulation is that the sacred figures in any healthy religion must be, like the Greek gods, glorifications of human potential rather than, like the Christian gods, anti-human ideals. The new religious festival will celebrate rather than condemn sexuality, will be a festival of life rather than death.

Durkheim’s definition of religion is one-sided. As Schopenhauer points out, no religion has achieved “world” status without a doctrine of immortality, without some kind of “solution” to the problem of death. Great religions have a public aspect that consists in the creation of Durkheim’s “moral community,” but they also have a private aspect that addresses the individual in the solitude of his confrontation with death. As I indicated in responding to your first question, Nietzsche’s private god is Dionysus: overcoming fear of death is a matter of inhabiting the perspective in which the everyday self shows up as just “a poor wave in the necessary wave-play of becoming,” a mere ripple in the great ocean of causes and effects which, from this perspective, constitutes one’s self. This might sound like Wagnerian life-denial, but it is actually the opposite: not the yearning for absorption into the Dionysian, but the prophylactic against allowing its inevitability darkening one’s Apollonian life.

This might not fit the premise, but the tech industry's current usage of "AI" is probably misleading to a ton of people. People think robots and terminator etc, but tech uses it as a shorthand for applied machine learning. Obviously connected to AI but I just wonder how many people think their phone Siri has sentience or something when they hear it as an AI

what's that theory that concedes that free markets may be optimal, but given the existence of the regulatory state, the most efficient policy "move" to make markets more optimal may not necessarily be towards the free market?

"Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually—I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels. And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about ‘dialectics’—I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know…"